Saturday, October 31, 2015

Every
now and then you should check your internal tape against reality.

Protecting
Democracy:
Turkey's insecure and paranoid would-be dictator, president Tayyip
Erdoğan, faced with an election he shouldn't win but will, has seen
cops to seize two TV stations run by political parties that oppose
him. He's also imprisoned
a couple of children who tore down one of his election posters –
a crime that could get them two years in jail. Erdoğan continues
his support for ISIS, attacking Syrian Kurds (along with killing
Turkish Kurds whenever it's convenient). He's a US ally.

Over/Over:Apple's made
$234 billion in profits this year and has
north of $300 billion stuck under mattresses overseas – money it
has paid no taxes on. Why
do we let them get away with this?

Ingrate:
An Englishman who has been released from fourteen years of captivity
in the US torture/interrogation camp at Guantánamo without either
charges nor a trial, wants to sue for damages. Again, why did we let
them get away with this?

Over
There:A
federal appeals court says that
federal agencies like the FBI and CIA – or the Agriculture
Department for that matter – can imprison and torture Americans as
long as it is done outside the US. Nice to know they can't catch you
here and torture you there. Not legally, anyway. [Enter chorus...]

Redeployment:
Saudi Arabia has flown 500 ISIL soldiers [ISIL is pretty much a
wholly owned subsidiary of the Saudi government] from bases in Turkey
to an airport in Aden, Yemen where they are to join with Saudi led
forces in attacking Houthi forces.

Politics:
Dennis
Hastert, GOP Speaker of the House speaker
for eight years paid
over $3.5 million in bribes to keep his sexual misconduct secret,
will serve “no more than” six months and may serve no time at
all. Where Denny, who went from being a high school coach to a low
paid congressman, got that much money in the first place is not a
question anybody really wants to answer.

Possession
Of Possessions:A
US circuit court has ruled that possession is ten tenths of the law
when it comes to stolen art. In the case of Van Gogh's The Night
Cafe, Yale cheerfully admits that it was stolen from the Konowaloff
family during the Russian Revolution and somehow ended up being
bought by the school in 1961. Yale was particularly pleased because
the ruling
will probably let them keep other works of art stolen by the Nazis
and later re-stolen and sold.

Democracy
Being “Messy”:
During the eight years that Nouri Maliki was the US handmaiden
running Iraq, he and his henchmen made off with $500 billion –
easily one of the most sucessful profitable war profiteers in
history. Why didn't we send them a few more pallet loads of $100s and
keep our troops at home?

Us
and Them: The
100 top paid CEOs in the US have retirement savings that dwarf the
combined savings of 40%
of all US families. They stole it fair and square, much
of it by shipping your job overseas. Note that at least half
of US workers lack company-sponsored retirement plans.

Friday, October 30, 2015

Clarification:
The US now acknowledges that “direct action” is combat
by another name, as it starts (?) ground operations against ISIS
in Iraq... and Syria. Okay, so they didn't actually say “Syria”
yet.

Family:
Our closest relative is the orangutan, 20,000
of whom are danger
of being burned alive
in Indonesian forest fires.

Asked
& Obvious:
Are all these corporate share buy backs jeopardizing future growth?
Nope, if there was any hope of expanding future growth they wouldn't
be trying to bamboozle the shareholders with buybacks.

Buy
High, Sell Low:As part of the
budget/debt limit deal, at the GOP's insistence the
government will
sell off part of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. You know, the oil
we've squirrelled
away to protect against an unseen disaster to our oil supply. The
one we filled up at $80-$90 a barrel. Because, as
the GOP points out, we can get $44 abarrel for it these days.

Straw,
Last Few:We
live in terrible times in a terrible country, according to the GOP
candidates. Our women's physicians are harvesting brains from living
babies (Carly Fiorina). The federal government is persecuting
Christians for their religious beliefs (Ted Cruz), and putting them
in jail for practicing their beliefs (Mike Huckabee). Our nation is
being over-run by brown-skinned drug dealing rapists (Donald Trump).
Things are so bad that the president should unleash drone strikes on
those who would join ISIS (Lindsay Graham). And health insurance is
mandatory, gasp! (All of 'em.)

Farmer's
Almanac: It
takes a long time to walk from Aleppo, Syria to Sweden.
Those who set out today will still be enroute in December, looking
for shelter in January... It's a
human tragedy that will become far worse.

Freedom
From The Press:
The government refuses to obey a US District Court order to release
videotapes to the press that show prisoners at Guantanamo being
force-fed. Rectally. According to the judge, “what
the government is really saying is that its classification system
trumps the decisions of the federal courts.”

Simplification: In Bal Harbour, a ritzy community just north of Chicago, the
cops simplified law enforcement by becoming the criminals and running
a money-laundering service in and around Chicago. They “earned”
$2.4 million while returning $71.5 million to their clients who were
mostly drug dealers. No arrests were made. No police reports were
made. Profits, however, were made. And spent. Somewhat like the
Justice Department and Wall Street.

American
Heroes: We are
constantly bombarded with propaganda proclaiming that our combat
troops are “American heroes”. Unless, of course, they have PTSD.
If a soldier comes back from a second, third or fourth combat
deployment and is diagnosed with mental health problems (Imagine!),
the Army gives them dishonorable discharges for “misconduct”. In
the last six years they've done this over 22,000 times. This saves
the military and the VA immense amounts of money and lets the
military downplay the horrific psychological damage repeated
deployments required by an Army far too small for maintaining
the empire its
assigned tasks.

Thursday, October 29, 2015

Reality
Check: Paul Ryan got only 200 votes from his fellow Republicans,
becoming their nominee for Speaker of the House. It seems likely he
will go on to actually become Speaker. But when he does, remember he
only got 200 Republican votes, and it takes 218 votes to pass a bill
in the lower house of Congress.

Understatement:Iraq
wants
to make it very clear that they
do not want US troops now, never have, and did not ask for them now,
nor at any earlier date – no matter
how Cheney remembers things.

Handy
Dandy:
Pepsi's Aquafina rband
bottled water – the largest selling brand of bottled water – will
now carry labeling that confesses what has been true
all along: it's tap water. Sure it comes in a neat little
environmentally disastrous plastic bottle, but what's inside comes
from”public water sources.” Tap water, in other words.

Preview:
In Arizona, which recently cut benefits under TANF (food stamps) by
20%, a poor family can get welfare assistance. But only for 12
months. Total. Over a lifetime. Chill out, this is the Paul Ryan
model of public assistance where
being poor is a
personal problem.

An
Echo: “Rubio
has missed more votes than any other senator this year. His seat is
regularly empty for floor votes, committee meetings and intelligence
briefings. He says he's MIA from his J-O-B because he finds it
frustrating and wants to be president, instead. [...] Sorry, senator,
but Floridians sent you to Washington to do a job. We've got serious
problems with clogged highways, eroding beaches, flat Social Security
checks and people who want to shut down the government.”

Progress:
The Senate has passed a cyber-security bill which contains legal
protections for internet providers who share your personal
information with the government. The politicians are portraying this
further erosion of privacy as a Good Idea.

Dollars
And Nonsense:
Ben Carson's budget plan calls for a Balanced Budget Amendment which
would keep the government from helping the poor and unemployed come
the next economic downturn. It would impose a 10% Biblical flat tax,
increasing taxes on the poor and middle class and cutting them
dramatically for the rich. This would raise about $1.1 trillion a
year, while the current federal budget is north of $4 trillion. To
close this gap Carson would freeze government hiring (saving about $5
billion a year) and reduce all government budgets (except defense) by
4% (saving another $15 billion a year). Of course the math doesn't
work, it wasn't supposed to. After all, Ben
seriously believes the world was created in six days, and in such
a world, the irrational is mandatory.

Clarification:
About a thousand Bikini islanders are asking to be relocated to the
US as rising seas “threaten their adopted home.” Actually, it is
not “their adopted home”, it is the small island concentration
camp where the military shipped them when we wanted to nuke their
home.

Worse
And Worser:
Sure the Planned Parenthood investigating committee under Marsha
Blackburn is going to be about as bad as the last half-dozen Benghazi
committees, but the prizewinner is really the House Science
Committee, headed by Lamar Smith of Texas who doesn't believe in
science.

Mistakes
Were Made:
Tony Blair now says that he's sorry that his and Bush's war crimes
led to the creation of ISIS. Fine, as far as it goes, but the real
blame rests on Paul Bremer's insistence on disbanding the Iraqi Army
and the US Command staff for giving in to Cheney and imprisoning and
torturing its former leaders.

Wednesday, October 28, 2015

Sure
governments are bad at business. So is business; most startups
fail.

Speak
Softly And Carry A Dictionary:
While Obama continues to maintain that there will be no boots on the
ground, or if there are they will not be engaged in combat
operations, the Secretary of Defense says the troops deployed in Iraq
(and occasionally in Syria) will only engage
in “direct action”, not combat. He also said that no
US-trained Syrian rebels had come under Russian airstrikes because,
despite a lot of effort and money, there are no US-trained rebel
forces.

Echo:
The newly elected president of Guatemala is a professional comedian.
That's not exactly what we did – George was an amateur.

Definition:
The US Special Forces soldiers who called in the air strike on the
Doctors Without Borders Hospital in Afghanistan knew it was a
hospital but thought it was under Taliban control, making the sick
and wounded men, women and children fair game to be burned to death
in their beds. Knowingly bombing a hospital is a war crime, no
matter whose running the place. Same goes for
the Saudi attack on a similar hospital in Yemen.

Brave
New World:
What number comes next in this series: 1981, 1982, 1983, ____ ?
Right, 1985, because the Orwell's estate claims exclusive use of the
number “1984”.

Another
Sideshow: House
Republicans, seeing the shine has gone from their Benghazi investigation and not sure Marsha Blackman can carry the day with
her Planned Parenthood witch hunt, is opening an investigation aimed
at impeaching the director of the IRS. Because the DOJ said it found
no crime...

Frying
Pan/Fire:
Despite the Saudi war on Yemen and the long-running civil war,
refugees from Ethiopia
and Somali continue to arrive, fleeing
worse lives at home.

Neverland:
The main
Republican candidates more or less agree on tax policy: Zero tax on
capital gains and much lower taxes rates on everyone plus a $2,500
per-child tax credit. Oh, and a balanced budget. And growth, lots
and lots of economic growth. Too bad all our prevous rounds of tax
cuts for the rich haven't produced much growth, but this time it'll
be different. It says so, right there in Ayn Rand's novels.

Interesting
Idea:In
order to reduce the influence of unconscious bias in the selection
process, college
applications in the UK
will be identified only
by number, no names.

The
Way We Were:
“Why should we pay any attention to anything Republicans say about
deficits?” Since JFK, every Republican President has deepened the
deficit and every Democratic President has left office with much
smaller budget deficits than he inherited.

First,
Amended: The
US Customs have intercepted about 300 clay tablets thought to be
looted Biblical artifacts looted from Iraq, destined for Hobby
Lobby's corporate headquarters. The Christianized owners will claim
this interferes with their constitutional right to worship graven
images.

Principal
Principles:As the Republican
party dissolves into an incoherent swirl
of ideologues, the odds
seem to
favor of the Democrats retaining the White House in
2016 and possibly 2020 and beyond., if fo no other reason than that
it is still an elective office. If the GOP cannot field candidates
who bridge the chasm between traditional Republicans and the crazies
on the Freedom Caucus/Tea Party edge while having at least some
appeal to the independent voters, it is doomed. Right now such a
candidate is not in view, and if one was he or she would be
dismembered by the far right who insist on repealing not just
Obamacare but every social advance made since FDR was first sworn in.

Rod And Gun Club News:
US hunters kill more than 700 lions every year, although calling
these guys 'hunters' is a stretch. It's more like getting laid in a
whore house and pretending you are a great lover. They rank along
side the poachers who use
cyanide to poison elephants in Zimbabwe.

Tuesday, October 27, 2015

Honorable
Men:Jon
Boehner and Barak Obama had a secret. For months they, along with
Pelosi and McConnell, have been working to avoid a US default in
November and a government shutdown in December. It may even have
been the impetus for Boehner's retirement – a parting gift to both
the Republican party and America, although a lot of Republicans will
not see it that way. It is not a done deal yet, it still needs at
least some Republican support in the House, but it is as good as it
is going to get for both sides. The budget and the debt are removed
from political play until after the next election, both sides get a
little and give a little. It's called politics, and that's what the
far right of the GOP simply doe not understand. The biggest single
beneficiary is, of course, Paul Ryan – who will not have those two
traps facing him on day one. Details are thin, a lot of feathers
have been ruffled, life goes on.

Earth
Reportedly Round:The
New
York AG is mounting an
investigation to determine if Internet providers are cheating their
customers. Nest up: Bears in the woods.

Merit
Badge:
Coal-fired power plants be damned, greedy idiots burning off forests
in Indonesia are second only to China in greenhouse gas emissions,
out-pacing the worst efforts of heedless Americans. Just to grow palm
oil for those very same heedless Americans to fatten themselves on.

Infallible,
Inc: The voice
of God's Earthly Representative has been handed a defeat by bigoted
bishops who have no intention of loving their gay brothers. Well,
not
openly.

You
Ain't Seen Nothing Yet:
The Republican crazies, having pointlessly beaten Benghazi to death,
have now set their investigative sights on Planned Parenthood. The
lineup is to be led by Marsha Blackburn, Joe Pitts and Diane Black
who will examine the fictitious sale of baby parts as documented by
the doctored and long since debunked videotapes. With luck it will
take less than four years and eight separate pointless hearings.

Voice
In The Wilderness:
Seven and a half years late, as usual, Obama
discovers that our
schools have an unhealthy addiction to testing instead of teacher.
Would have been nice for him to discover leadership somewhat earlier
in his presidency.

Show
Me The Money:
Over 85% of the money from right wing PACs that flows into the Tea
Party Leadership Fund flows right back out to consultants, not to
issues and most certainly not to candidates. It is hard to tell
which is the bigger con, the Tea Partiers are trying to pull on us,
or the one the funding fraudsters are pulling on the politicians.

Saturday, October 24, 2015

Variation
On A Theme:
When the anti-austerity left won the Greek elections, the EU/ECB/IMF
thwarted the will of the citizenry and used their financial hammers
to control the country in order to keep the bond-holders happy and
the euro alive. A similar drama appears to be unfolding in Portugal, where a coalition of leftist parties hold the majority but appear to be being kept from power with the constitutional president
reportedly refusing to permit the duly elected anti-austerity and strongly
eurosceptic parties from taking office. It will get noisy, very
noisy, before this gets settled.

Who
We Are: Given
that Donald Trump talks to the voters using a fourth-grade vocabulary
and Bernie Sanders talks to the same folks as though they'd at least
made it to high school, guess who's gonna win.

So?
Some bleeding heart liberals who don't understand profit margins
claim that resettling Syrian refugees would cost lest and result in
fewer deaths than widening the war on whoever it is we're at war with
at the moment. Or the next moment.

Run,
Don't Walk:Mainstream
economists are starting
to mutter vaguely about
the possible risk of a new recession in the US. Just as we were
getting used to this one.

Because
Donations:
While seriously underfunding the Department of Transportation,
House Republicans have voted to remove all records of trucking
company accidents and traffic safety information from the public
record. That'll teach those pesky personal injury lawyers and their
crippled clients.

It's
Come To This: The
American
Academy of Pediatricswant
all US doctors to screen every child they see for signs of
malnutrition or hunger.

Longer
Arm Of The Law:
An amendment to the cybersecurity bill pending in Congress would give
the US the right to pursue, prosecute and jail foreign nationals for
doing things in foreign countries with other foreigners as victims.
The crime does not have to happen in the US. Neither the perpetrator
nor the victim need
ever ti gave been in
the US. For 10 words or less, explain how Congress got the right to
give this supposed right to US courts, without citing an appropriate
passage of the Old Testament.

It's
Just Money:
Canada's new liberal government thinks it can do better than pay $10
billion for a bunch of F-35 fighter jets that can't fight.

Because
Stealth: Not
satisfied with their goal of having everyone in the country carrying
a concealed weapon, now the gun nuts want the right to secretly buy
silencers for their guns. But only to protect the hearing of those
who fire off a box or two of ammo on a Friday night. Has nothing to
do with being able to gun down children without making too much
noise.

Eeny,
Meeny,
Miny,
Moe:
Guess which “one country” stopped the UN from urging the
world-wide decriminalization of the personal possession and use of
drugs – all drugs.

Representatives:
The House Republicans have – for the 61st time – voted to repeal
Obamacare. They did not even hold a hearing on raising the debt
ceiling, because that isn't as important as their compulsory
groupthink session. Beats working for a living.

W/O
Comment: The
annual Love and Sex With Robots conference has been canceled. The
robots couldn't get time off.

Friday, October 23, 2015

The
Perils of Paul Ryan:
Paul Ryan, taking a victory lap around the Capital, says the far
right has capitulated to
his demands and are now united behind him, so he will reluctantly
agree to become the next Speaker of the House. A few details remain,
like the actual election, but it seems to be a done deal. Too bad we
don't know quite what
deals were done.

Pay
To Play: Some
Senate Democrats, having sat through seven previous Benghazi
investigations that came up with nothing of interest, say that the
current House Republican political witch hunt serves no legitimate
purpose and that the GOP should reimburse the taxpayers the entire
$5.4 million cost of the charade.

Smoking
Gunned:
Investigators from the TX AG's office raided a series of Planned
Parenthood facilities apparently looking for the “baby body parts”
being gruesomely harvested as shown in the doctored videos that made
the rounds recently. Texas has deprived the women's health provider
of all Medicaid funding and is looking for some evidence that might
keep a judge from telling them to back off – as has happened to GOP
led defunding in Arkansas and Louisiana.

University
Education: The
University of Kentucky claims it has exclusive rights to the word
“Kentucky” and no one else can use it on a product or t-shirt.
They also tried to copyright “education” but they couldn't prove
they had any.

Easy
Did It: San
Diego's Imprimis Pharmaceuticals is going to be marketing its own
version of pryimethamine for $1 a pill,, the generic drug that
little smartass was selling for $75o a pill. They'll probably lose
money at this, but certainly win in lots of other ways.

If
Only: So far
Iceland has
sent 26 of its top bankers to prison for their role in ruining their
banks and the Icelandic economy. So far the US Department of Just Us
has not brought criminal charges against anyone making more than
$14.67 an hour.

Go,
Who Halts There:
In Manchester, NH you need a good reason, a really good reason to
sit in your car on a public street in the middle of the afternoon.
Because if you don't you can be pepper sprayed, tasered, handcuffed
and arrested if the cops figure you are “not in the area for
legitimate purposes.” This one will cost the citizens a goodly
amount.

Cops
R Robbers:
Cops in West Tennessee say that if the state makes them stop stealing
money and property from people driving down the interstate through
'criminal forfiture', they will be forced to find other ways to pad
their meager salaries.

Eye
On The Prize:
The gays have finally achieved their goal – the IRS says it will
recognize same-sex marriages anywhere in the US for purposes of
taxation and the associated tax benefits.

Thursday, October 22, 2015

Extra!
Extra!
Israel's Benjamin
Netanyahu – concerned
that he was losing ground to the Republican crazies – assured the
World Zionist Congress that it was the Palestinians, not the Nazis,
who were responsible for the Holocaust. This isn't the first time
Bibi has tried to mislead a congress. This simply isn't true. Israel
would do well to keep comparisons to the Nazi's to themselves.

Hell
No, He Won't Go:
Biden will not seek presidency, resigns
as VP to begin new career
as a strip tease artist.

Compromised:
The Republican study Committee has issued its “Terms of Credit
Act” under which it would increase the nation's debt ceiling by
$1.5 trillion if and only if Congress passes legislation cutting $3.8
trillion in “mandatory funding” over the next ten years. [That
means cutting Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and food stamps by
about $400 billion a year.]These
House Republicans would
also
reach into the Senate and mandate a change in the Senate's own rules,
eliminating the
filibuster on spending bills. The legislation would also freeze all
government
regulations
until July 1, 2017, preventing
the Obama administration from issuing any new regulations –
essentially stopping
it from governing.This,
alone, should
doom their proposal.

Demockery:
A great majority of the American public wants
an end to the country's longest war. Congress knows this and just
doesn't care.

Coincidence:
In the last decade or so, Democratic
states have tended to pass laws making it easier for their citizens
to register and vote, while Republican-controlled states have made it
sometimes almost impossible to register and vote.

Leadership
Qualifications:
Paul Ryan, the GOP's answer to pockets on shirts and sliced bread,
wants to privatize Social Security and Medicare, and shut down all of
the federal government except for defense spending. Ryan also demands
that the right wing loonies leave him alone and go along with his
leadership decisions. Ryan refuses to agree to anything as a
pre-condition for the Freedom Caucus' endorsement and insists they go
along with rules changes that would limit their power in the future.
The game's afoot.

Duh?
CIA director John Brennan has used his personal AOL email account for
what surely looks like government business. Secret government
business.

Trust
Us: When
SunTrust bank lays off an IT worker, part of the agreement they must
sign to get their severance pay requires that they be on call, free,
for the next two years. Would you want to rely on a bank whose
computer systems are maintained by unpaid serfs?

Asked
& Obvious:
While Congress pretends it wants to reduce the number of incarcerated
American, why are Senate Republicans trying to expand the prison
population? Ever hear of for-profit prisons?

Wednesday, October 21, 2015

Let's
You and Him Fight:
The Saudi foreign minister has warned Iran to
“stop meddling in the affairs of the kingdom's neighbors... in the
region, in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen.” Especially
in Syria, where the Saudis support the Sunni factions fighting Assad
and the Shia, which are backed by Iran.

A
Pound Of Flesh:
In Alabama Judge Shylock Wiggins will trade you a fine for a pint
of blood. The full schedule isn't posted, but rumor has it that a
kidney will get you out most felonies. Otherwise, the Judge is sure,
“The sheriff has enough handcuffs.”

Down
To The Sea...
The US is selling warships valued at $11.25 billion to Saudi Arabia.
In that the Saudis are not overly famous for their naval prowess, it
is a good question who is bribing whom.

Noted:
Ever notice that those who worry about the deficit want to do things
that increase the deficit? Like tax cuts, “ tax
cuts do not pay for themselves and lead to much larger deficits.”
And
foreign wars, boyo do those things cost.

Move
Along, Nothing To Prosecute.... Barclays
and
Wachovia, chipping in $378 million, have joined RBS, JPMorgan,
Credit Suisse and UBS in bringing the banks' combined payments to the
National
Credit Union Administration for
a wide variety of crimes and misdemeanors they committed while
fleecing us all with various mortgage backed securiteis. No one, of
course, did anything wrong... it's all just “good will”.

The
Way We Were:Rep.
Mo Brooks (Ready-AL)
says
he is ready to start impeachment proceedings against President
Hillary the day she is sworn in. Nothing like being prepared.

Finer
Points:
In September, US housing starts crept up a tad to 1.2 million units.
Yea! Homebuilder sentiment is reportedly at decade-level highs.
More Yea! Building permits, which builders apply for before they can
act on these positive vibes, followed the current trend and weakened
further. Big Boo!!

In
Absentia:
Since Shell shelled out $7 billion without hitting it richer, the
Interior Department decided to spare others the embarrassment and has
canceled future auctions of leases in the Arctic and will not extend
the current leases there. No point in wasting money.

Swan
Song:
Chris Christie, who has had his hopes of moving to the White House
crushed, is taking his displeasure out on the chronically ill and
disabled, by crushing their housing program funding.

Houdini,
Inc:
Over the last decade, Chicago cops have “disappeared” more than
7,000 people into an off-the-books interrogation facility, 6,000 of
them black males, where they were held incommunicado and denied
access to a phone or lawyers.

Motivation:
Montana Republicans have blocked the state from accepting $40
million in federal pre-school funding because it would cut into the
profits of private pre-schools.

Tuesday, October 20, 2015

The
Enemy Of My Enemy:
One thing that the Russian airstrikes has made very clear is that the
US/CIA has been equipping al-Qaeda's Syrian franchise with weapons
and pretending they are “moderate rebels”. The working theory
is that when compared to ISIS, al-Qaeda is quite all right. Tell
that to New York.

Asked
And Depends On Who You Are:Was
Poverty Reduction in the Developing World Worth the Hit to U.S.
Workers? “an interesting philosophical question, but it has
nothing to do with the reality.” The
poverty in the Southern
states is largely
attributable to the outsourcing of jobs to the developing world.

Logically:
If projected third quarter earnings do not justify current stock
market confidence and valuations, then...

Our
Crowd:
The only explanation for the growing support that “the triumvirate
of crazy -
Trump/Carson/Cruz — has is
the identification their supporters share with them. Their
supporters do not understand how crazy these candidates are because
they, too, are batshit crazy. Many of the others – Bush, Rubio,
Ryan – escape being thought crazy because of their practiced
ability to lie with a straight face.

Dumbed
Up:
The Donald has more support from Republicans
without a college education than any of the GOPers has among college
grads. And Jebbie is Mr.
Inevitable no more.

Stupid
Works:
Drug testing people seeking government assistance has repeatedly
been proven to be useless in every way but one. To start with,
welfare recipients don’t do drugs more than folks with money, so
drug testing requires
an unreasonable search. And
it is
obviously intended to shame
and
demean those
needing help. That's
what makes it acceptable – those voters
who
believe the downtrodden are freeloaders.
Make
'em suffer and crawl,
it's the Republican way of showing compassion.

Ring
Around The Rosy:
Wal-Mart's acknowledgement of its sales and profit problems is fair
warning to all those in its supply and manufacturing chain that they
are going to be squeezed even more. If Wal-Mart goes, so will many
of them.

Nostalgia:
“It is, after all, rather odd to talk about the virtues of
conservatism-that-was without giving a single example of someone who
embodied those supposed virtues. Who’s the poster child for the
intellectually humble, incrementalist, humane creed that
we’ve supposedly
lost?” We
suspect there
never was such a person.

Datapoint:
The data is unequivocally clear: American cops disproportionately
kill blacks by a wide margin. Attempts to explain this runs up
against this reality: Men who hunt deer have more interactions with
deer than vegetarians do. Tend
to kill 'em, too.

Text
Me:
Turns out that social media is anti-social. The under-30 are
addicted to their cell phones and think that texting is a social
activity. It is not.

Unconditional
Surrender: In
return for not forcing the United States into default, Senate
Majority Mitch McConnell demands major
reductions Medicare
spending and Social
Security benefits as
well as repeal of EPA Clean Water regulations that interfere with the
coal industry's dumping mountaintops into our streams and rivers.
McConnell is giving Obama less than three weeks to capitulate to all
these demands. Ain't gonna happen. Then, come December, the crazies
want to shut down the government if Obama doesn't defund Planned
Parenthood. And this ain't gonna happen, either.

Default
Position: All
the independent focus groups and online polls show that Bernie
Sanders 'won' the first debate, so naturally the media continues to
insist that Clinton prevailed. Because they don't want him, even if
we do.

Previews:
John Kerry assures us that the current migrant crisis in Europe is
but a small-scale rehearsal for the mass migrations that the rising
sea levels, intense droughts and other impacts of global
climate change will bring. Brace yourselves.

Your
Money or Your Lies:Ben
Carson, self described
tough guy who warded off a gun waving robber, now 'thinks' that
Popeye's didn't actually call the police after the robbery. Me, I'd
like fries with that.

About
That War: Tony
Blair agreed with George Bush to launch a war in Iraq at least a year
before Dick Cheney got around to starting it. And we don't even have
the decency to be embarrassed
about our military adventuresome.

Clarification:
The government will soon require that all drones be registered;
yours, not theirs.

Evidence:
The Social Security Administration's 2014 Wage Report confirms that
the economic recovery has done little for the majority of workers.
Median wages rose $366 last year, bringing wages back up to 1999
levels. But corporate
profits are soaring.

What
Big Teeth
You Have:The
CEOs of several of the world's
largest oil and gas companies - BG
Group, BP, Eni,
Pemex, Reliance Industries Ltd., Repsol SA, Saudi Aramco, Shell,
Statoil and Total – now
claim ““Our shared
ambition is for a 2 degree Celsius future. … Over the coming years
we will collectively strengthen our actions and investments to
contribute to reducing the greenhouse gas intensity of the global
energy mix.”

Quoted:
“The only upside of the concentration of the wealth at the top is
that they have more money to pay in taxes.”
Joseph E. Stiglitz

Noted:
“The idea that
globalization is a force that is good and beneficial for all is an
illusion. Tectonic economic changes such as those brought by
globalization always have winners and losers.” And
you know which you are.

Saturday, October 17, 2015

Religion
is like a hobbyhorse; I don't mind you having one as long as you
don't try to make me get on and ride with you. - Tristram
Shandy, more or less.

Hasten,
Slowly: The
administration is reportedly considering delaying presenting the TPP
to congress for ratification until after the 2016 election, when the
political costs of selling out the American people during a “lame
duck” session would be lower.

Morbidity
and mortality:
Since the 2008 financial crisis, central banks have printed up over
$14 trillion dollars in
IOUs
on someone's labor or property. This
didn't
cure the problem, which was too much debt. It added to it,
increasing global debt by 40%. Seems that adding more debt doesn't
actually address the problem of too much debt. Good thing everybody
pretends not to notice this.

Slide
Effects:
Germany authorities have told VW that their lackadaisical approach to
covering up their emissions crimes won't do, and have ordered them to
recall some 8.5 million cars and fix them. The government will then
test the cars to make sure the repairs are effective. VW says it
might be able to start the retrofits in
late 2016. This is just Germany. The rest of the EU – where about
a third of all VWs will need repair – will follow suit. In the US
it remains to be seen if VW has enough money to spread around
Washington to avoid this hassle.

Quoted:
“You can pretty much
name any intractable problem in the U.S. and you can trace it back to
the money corrupting the political process. ...” Barry
Ritholtz

Roster:
Just so you remember, the Paul Ryan the crazies want for Speaker is
the guy who wants to abolish the FDA, the National Institutes of
Health, the Air Traffic Control System, gut Medicare and Medicaid
while cutting taxes on the rich and spending on the poor. That Paul
Ryan.

The
Way We Were:
In constant 2013 dollars, the median US household income in 1999 was
$57,000. In 2013 it was $52,000 - nearly 10% less. Your results
may vary.

Droning
On: The
drone-based US assassination program kills about seven bystanders for
every intended target eliminated, but “It's like swatting flies, we
can do it forever easily and you feel nothing... how often do you
really think about killing a fly?”

Turtle:
Bernie Sanders raised more campaign funds in the third quarter than
any of the Republican candidates.

Roses:
The CIA pretends that it waterboarded only one detainee. Okay,
after a while they admitted that it was maybe three detainees.
Maximum. And by torturing the English language, the lawyers may be
right. But if you don't actually use a board, is it still
water-boarding? According to the spooks, nope. If you include other
forms of “simulated drowning”, then they will grudgingly admit
there might have been another dozen detainees “water doused”.
Sorry, guys. We all know that “informal field interrogations”
most likely subjected tens if not hundreds more to this form of
torture. But, hey, you want to pretend otherwise, fine by us.
What's on TV tonight?

We
Didn't
Know:The
British Treasury says that “hundreds of billions of pounds of
international criminal money” is laundered through British banks
every year. Almost makes you wonder why they don't do something to
stop it. Almost.

Asked
& Obvious:
If the “Freedom Caucus” is so great, why don’t they just
nominate one of their own?

Friday, October 16, 2015

Customer
Demand: Mich
McConnell thinks
the US public wants massive cuts to Medicare, reductions in Social
Security and the neutering of the EPA's attempts to preserve
drinkable water and breathable air. He's so sure that he says he
will make the US into a deadbeat nation that cannot pay its bills if
Obama and the Dems don't give in. They aren't going to, so now what?
Are these guys deliberately setting out to destroy the Republican
Party? Or the whole
country?

Wrong
Is Wrong:
Serious and respected editors of The Lancet, The
New England Journal of Medicine as wall as the Stanford
School of Medicine say that at least half of all medical
clinical results published are incorrect, unreliable, false. It is
not just that the results cannot be replicated, but they are false,
faked, untrue. Medical science, they say, has “taken a turn towards
darkness,” and “It
is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research
that is published". Particularly
studies involving drugs and medical devices. In short,
"there
is increasing concern that most current published research findings
are false" In
earlier days these charges would be headline news, prompting
Congressional investigations. Today it is business as usual.

Up
Against The Wal-Mart:
There's been a lot of hooey written about Wal-Mart's problems and its
supposed solutions, but it comes down to this: Wal-Mart is a
retailer trying to manage its way to a profit. Doesn't work. Ask
K-Mart, Sears, JCPenney and friends. You have to sell your way to a
profit and you can't sell what you don't have on the shelf in a dirty
store with disinterested employees. Chasing Amazon sounds like fun,
but Amazon isn't their competition, Dollar General is. Cutting prices
more will start another race to the bottom, and Wal-Mart seems
to already be there. And $30 or $40 billion in
stock buybacks isn't working either.

Circus
Act: The
Republican
Wannabees have settled on a general plan to replace ObamaCare with a)
tax credits to help the poor pay for private insurance plans, b)
reducing the current protections for people with pre-existing
conditions, and c) limiting federal funds given to the states for
Medicaid programs. Everybody in favor, go to your rooms.

Dumb
& Dumber:
Seems the new and improved 2016 Vws have a new and improved ways of
fooling emission testing protocols. Makes it hard to pretend that
the bosses didn't know and didn't authorize these things. Also will
make it impossible to sell them in the US. Das Auto know better.

Fearless
Foes: We are,
it says here in the propaganda pamphlets, fighting ISIS. Our vaunted
air assets on on the job! Other reports say that ISIS earns $1.5
million a day to finance its war by selling petroleum. I've lived
in West Texas and can assure you that oil wells, pipelines and
refineries can neither
run nor hide. They
just sit there. Yet the ISIS oil fields keep pumping money into
their barbaric cause. Why is it that only
196 of over 10,000 US airstrikes have
been targeted at ISIS oil– which
keeps on keeping on? Are we that bad, or
are we not trying?

Stand
And Deliver:
For a long, long time the Republican base – both the money and the
mouthy – have been promised an end to big government, abortion,
illegal (and legal) immigration, not to mention gays littering up the
public square and handouts to the lazy. And the Republicans in
Congress have not kept the faith. Faceed with the unmeetable
demands they themselves helped create, they now find themselves not
only unable to govern but unable to even elect a leader. All they
know how to do is make promises – especially the promise to bring
the nation to its knees in supplication. Ain't gonna happen. Keep
you eyes on the center ring.

Our Motto

Keep fightin' for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don't you forget to have fun doin' it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin' ass and celebratin' the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.